Bed of Nails Read online

  “After ‘homosexual’, the second word that explains Alan’s story is ‘torture’. It was a long business, very long, because the subject was him, and it was a kind of therapy. We were both beginners, and he kept disappearing without a word, for weeks or months. We stayed friends, but it was difficult. So two years ago, when I’d finished the research, he was at the end of his tether. He’d been through the worst. When I wanted to submit my thesis, it got hard for both of us. America wouldn’t leave him alone, it was killing him as much as the drugs were. I said, ‘Look, you should go away, go abroad.’ And I thought Paris might be a good idea. He listened to me and he went. A year later, I couldn’t stay at home either, and I came to France too. My mother had bought this bit of land in the Lot in the 1970s before she went to San Francisco. And she still owned it. That’s where I live now. Alan Mustgrave died four days ago, during his last show, in the rue de l’Hirondelle. In front of an audience.”

  The bottle of vin ordinaire was empty, When he had finished speaking, John was almost paralytic. The old gangster’s eyelids were heavy and he was looking strained.

  “So what you going to do about your mate’s debts, then?”

  John leaned forward a little.

  “Don’t know … I thought maybe the best thing is to go back home.”

  John looked round at the cabin which reminded him of his tepee.

  “Where I live, Bunker, it’s …”

  “Bunker, who are you calling Bunker?”

  “Edward Bunker: he’s this guy back in the States, he was in and out of prison a lot. And one day he came out with a book, he’d written, a novel, and after that he stayed out of jail. He’s dead now, but he died outside.”

  Bunker accepted this introduction of his double without flinching, except for a slight twitch of his eyelids.

  “So, I was saying, where I live, it’s no bigger than this, only the walls are canvas. I don’t like the city any more. Walls scare me.”

  Bunker shook out the bottle to catch the last drop.

  “Yeah well, keep clear of them, kid.”

  Mesrine was dozing at their feet. John was persuading himself that he should get out of Paris. But the clarity that alcohol can bring before it knocks you out was troubled by the sense of unfinished business. The warning he had received was anything but an answer, and he still had questions.

  “Bunk, is there anywhere I can get a shower?”

  “Yeah, son, behind this cabin there’s a little shed. And let’s hope a bit of cold water’ll open your eyes for you. ’Cos you look to me like someone that’s going to do something stupid.”

  John got up, and flexed his muscles to try and regain his balance.

  “All I want is to understand. That’s all.”

  Bunker blinked slowly again.

  “Stupid bloody shrink.”

  The cold water and a shave did him good, but failed to clear his eyes. Bunker had put on his park warden’s cap and had Mesrine on a leash.

  “I can’t stop you, son, but I think you’re on a hiding to nothing. Christ Almighty, I don’t know if it’s because it’s your job but I haven’t had anyone talk to me that long for ages. Your story of meeting your pal, that reminds me of another one, just tonight. I don’t believe in luck, I believe you get what you ask for. If you’ve fallen in with an old geezer like me, it was to give you a message. This guy who stabs himself and all, you’ve done as much as anyone could for him, you should save your own skin now. Joke intended, because the truth is going to cost you. So now, it’s up to you.”

  “I’ll watch out. But I’ve got debts too, Alan wasn’t the only one.”

  John held out his hand again.

  “So what’s your name really?”

  “Just call me Bunker, that’s fine. In Paris, this is your home. Your stuff’s safe here.”

  He gave John a key, explaining which gate to use after eight at night. Mesrine barked as John walked off and Bunker was left standing in front of the pot of geraniums, feeling certain he’d got his arm caught in a very bad machine. As he looked up at the sky, he pronounced with the air of a final judgement:

  “Mesrine, something’s going to hit us.”

  Around him, a green wire fence half a metre high marked out his little territory in the middle of the Luxembourg Gardens, a little plot among the trees, at the end of a lawn. And a white notice. “Closed to the public.”

  9

  Boulevard Voltaire, metro Saint-Ambroise. Delivery vans unloading clothes made in China, triple-parked, hazard lights blinking, Asian warehousemen going to and fro, cigarettes in mouths. Guérin was standing on the pavement, holding a box under his arm, like everyone else.

  The boss got into the car without a greeting. The reappearance of the yellow raincoat worried Lambert. The cap was still in place, but not sufficiently firmly to reassure him. The boss was looking like a conspirator again, and Lambert could see from his fidgeting hands that he wanted to scratch his head.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Périphérique, Porte Maillot.”

  “The kamikaze?”

  Guérin nodded, with a bob of the hat. The box of files, now once more on the back seat, gave off a smell that did not augur well.

  “Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing.”

  His perplexed deputy started the car, still preoccupied by the subject that had been worrying him all night. Savane. He couldn’t understand how anyone could call Savane “kid”. Something wrong there, something that got you in the gut. He was still formulating a question as they reached the Place de la République, when Guérin started to answer him. It was always amazing to Lambert to discover that he was so transparent.

  “The thing is, Barnier thought Savane was promising. But he was too unpredictable and violent. The Service needs a few pitbulls, but it’s got to keep them under control. He’d been blocked for three years, still only a brigadier-major. Never made it to lieutenant. He wasn’t put in for the competition, and his promotion would upset too many people, Barnier told me that, and asked me to try and make something of him. He wanted a dog-handler for Savane, and I tried to turn him into a bloodhound. He got promotion a year later. A good lad, but easily led. For better or for worse, Savane was thick with Kowalski and those other two, Berlion and Roman. The Fatal Four, tough guys inc. After Kowalski’s death, he took against me. But he knows what he owes me, and that I still believe in him, in spite of everything. That’s what makes him so aggressive. He couldn’t take sides, so he just fell in with the ratpack. And the ratpack is eating him alive.”

  Guérin paused and turned to his junior. “Lambert, kid, watch out for the future. I don’t want the same to happen to you.”

  Lambert stopped at a traffic light, dazed by this information rattled out at him machine-gun style. The lights changed without his noticing. From the whirlwind of words, something emerged, like a sprig of parsley on top of mashed potato. The boss thought he was capable of something! Trainee officer suddenly sounded in his ears as if it might actually lead to something else.

  “Lambert … Green light.”

  He pulled away, feeling on top of the world.

  “Boss, why are we going back there?”

  “Because of the dog, Lambert. A dog in the grass.”

  *

  Lambert parked the car on the hard shoulder and got out. He puffed out his chest, clad today in the colours of A.C. Milan, and put out his hand in authoritarian mode to stop the traffic. He walked to the middle of the road, keeping the vehicles at bay for Guérin to cross in his own time.

  They stepped over the guardrail and walked on to the waste patch. A dusty flat piece of ground. Above them was the Palais des Congrès. On one side, the exit to the Porte Maillot and the périphérique, on the other, the exit to the outer ring road. A Boeing 747 took off above them.

  In a supermarket trolley, a headless doll shared the space with an electric toaster, a deflated bicycle tyre and an office lamp with trailing wires. Two floral garden chairs stood on an easte
rn carpet, with several board games, a sewing machine in pieces, a radio and some books: thrillers, S.A.S. stories, literary bestsellers of yesteryear and cheap romances. In front of the carpet was a T.V. set, its screen replaced by a piece of cardboard on which someone had written in felt pen: “Paco’s Junk Yard”.

  Guérin looked up at the bridge, searching for the C.C.T.V. camera and the angle from which one would be hidden from it. The plot of land was not in its range: all you could see was a bit of grass to the right of the rail. On the final image of the H.G.V. skidding, after he had watched the video twenty times with Churchill screeching in his ear, Guérin had seen something in the grass. The head of a dog and two paws, merging into the fuzzy black and white of the security film. A dog, lying in the grass at the edge of the périphérique. And a hunch. The dog must have an owner. Possibly even a witness, right beside the point of impact.

  Leaning against one of the bridge’s supports, sitting on a stained mattress, holding a litre bottle in his hand, Paco was eyeing them. At his feet, the dog was asleep.

  When they had arrived the other day at the scene of the “accident”, there had been nobody on this triangular patch of polluted ground. Paco and his dog had made themselves scarce before the police arrived. They had come back afterwards. The hawker of junk didn’t seem surprised to see them, and his expression showed that he could tell the difference between a couple of punters and two detectives from police H.Q.

  The dog didn’t even twitch an ear until Lambert planted himself in front of the mattress, badge in hand. When the dog did wake up, it fixed one yellow eye on the young trainee: the other was blank. A hole surrounded by bristles. A one-eyed dog then, probably deaf too, and smelling of old age. Paco, under the dirt, was unhealthily pale. Guérin could already feel his throat itching and his lungs on the verge of caving in. It was a lethal place to spend even a short spell of time.

  Under the bridge, the noise drowned out their voices. Paco stood up, slid the bottle into a large pocket in his overcoat and signalled to them to follow him. They stopped at the point of the triangle with cars shooting past them on two sides, driving round Paris in both directions. The dog stretched out among the straggly weeds, near the rail, in the same place as on the video. He watched the cars with his one eye, remembering perhaps how he used to chase them when he was a pup. Guérin was hoping that this half-blind and deaf creature wasn’t the only eye-witness.

  Paco looked sharp in a depressing sort of way. His intelligence hadn’t saved him from ending up here. The thin face, originally dark-skinned, now yellowish, was deep under layers of dirt. His filthy and ill-fitting clothes were in absurdly bright colours, like his junk, at the meeting point of dilapidation and hope. He choked when he started to speak, and cleared his throat by spitting out a gob of phlegm. It was impossible to guess his age: anywhere between thirty and fifty.

  “I know you cops come back.”

  His voice had adjusted perfectly to the noise level, loud and clear.

  Guérin had to force his own to make himself heard.

  “Why did you run away after the accident?”

  Pure rhetoric, of course. Paco, if that was his real name, would have worries about his residence permit and I.D. papers, even if he had made a good choice of this no-man’s-land. Just bad luck. Some rich kid had decided to kill himself just in front of him, and his dog had been caught on camera.

  “No trouble. Plizz! You give me work, I work! Now here I am, I sell junk stuff. I don’t want no problems.”

  A volcanic fit of coughing which produced black sputum was evidence enough that he already had serious problems. His red-rimmed eyes bulged out of their sockets.

  “Where are you from?”

  “España.”

  Guérin’s round eyes looked deep into the feverish eyes of this illegal immigrant.

  “And before that?”

  “Tunis …”

  Paco was trembling and his panic described in a second many difficult border crossings. Perhaps he had found something a bit better here than over there. But it was a toss-up.

  “Don’t worry, we’re not here to give you trouble. We want to know what you saw.”

  The tubercular junk vendor scrutinised them for several seconds. The little man with his flat cap didn’t look too threatening. The big fair guy, with his tracksuit and curly hair, was yawning.

  “I say what I see, you help me? Human right, yes, political refugee?”

  “Political?”

  “Immigration people, say I have no danger back home. Two years’ prison, Inspecteur! All because I don’t sell my land to policeman in my village. They don’t believe! My family back there, Inspecteur. Four years now I am in France. I don’t want trouble!”

  “Tell us first, and then we’ll see if we can do something.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yeah.”

  Paco scratched his trousers and frowned. He looked as if he were remembering other poor devils like him who had tried to do the right thing and ended up being guillotined because nobody believed them.

  “Not much I see. This mister, he come running, the black car go one way, then the truck hit him. Nothing else, and I run away.”

  The little guy with the cap didn’t look satisfied. The big one, grinning like a kid, unzipped his jacket. Paco jumped as he glimpsed the Beretta.

  “No, Mister, plizz! That’s all I see! Three people in the car, dead man, truck!”

  Guérin raised his hand theatrically at Lambert to restrain his deputy, who was bursting with lethargy.

  “What did you say about the car? Who was in it?”

  Paco coughed up a bit more of his lung. The traffic went on roaring past. He tried to overcome his fear.

  “No problems!”

  “You’re fine, no problems, just tell me!”

  “Shit. I know it. Now I’m going to have big trouble!”

  “If you need papers, I’ll see what I can do. And we’ll get you to a doctor. O.K.?”

  Paco scratched at his clothes again, and at the colony of fleas at home inside them.

  “A doctor?”

  “Yes, promise.”

  “So this mister, he’s running, no clothes, big smile, arms out like this!”

  Paco stretched out his arms which made him cough some more.

  “In the black car, Allah be my witness, these three, they don’t look surprised, like they don’t worry or nothing. The car, it just goes past, and then boom! The truck.”

  Guérin was holding his cap with one hand, and his raincoat trembled as he began to shake. The sound of the périphérique was invading the racket inside his head.

  “Who was in the car?”

  Paco put his hands together and looked up at the sky.

  “Allah help me, why am I so stupid? In the car, two men, one lady. Blonde lady. All I see, see with my eyes.”

  He waved towards the traffic.

  “Nothing else. Makach!”

  “What were they like? Clothes, age?”

  “Mister Commissaire, it was very, very fast. The lady behind, the men in front. Rich guys. Good clothes. Like you, not young, not old. Driver, he’s got a beard. Lady, she looks back when the truck squash man. Then I’m off. Allah’s my witness, I never come back here no more.”

  Lambert had stopped the traffic again, to spare Guérin the humiliation of being run over absent-mindedly. In the car, the boss had almost had another crisis. He had taken off the cap and scratched the scabs on his scalp, and written in his notebook signs which luckily this time looked like letters. Then he had fallen silent, a block of congested ideas, completely prostrate. Lambert shifted from one foot to the other. The boss’s Big Theory interested him about as much as a chess match on T.V. He had some inkling of what he was after – one or more people who got their kicks out of following suicides – a bit like themselves in a way – but he didn’t take it very seriously. Just another peculiar tic of his boss. This Paco guy said he had seen someone. The boss ought to have been happy to know he was
n’t alone in his crazy ideas. Obviously his joy at not thinking himself mad had lasted about ten minutes. He was back in the black hole again.

  Lambert had driven them home, whistling to himself to keep his spirits up … Spring had decided to pack it in too. The sky weighed down on them like an upside-down privy, waiting to pour its dark contents over their heads.

  *

  On the office door, someone had sellotaped up two newspaper cuttings. When other colleagues made the trip to their outpost, it was never good news.

  On the larger cutting was a photo of a little man in a cloth cap walking on a bridge towards another who was clinging to a post. Rescue on the Pont Alexandre III!

  A news item of a few lines followed, describing the courageous feat of Lieutenant Guérin from the Prefecture of Police. Scrawled furiously across the photo: “So you rescue some people, do you, Guérin?” signed “K”. Lambert read through the article – his own name was not mentioned – but Guérin showed no interest in it. The other cutting was just a news-in-brief item:

  Last night, Sunday 13 April, at the Caveau de la Bolée in the 6th arrondissement, a performing fakir died during his show. Alan Mustgrave (36) a U.S. citizen, died of bleeding caused by the wounds sustained during his act.

  The anonymous scribbler had been there too: “Too late for this one then!”

  Guérin leaned his head to one side, then took down the small cutting. Lambert, holding the still-malodorous box on his shoulder, pulled the other piece of paper off, and looked down the deserted corridor.

  “The bastards! You shouldn’t let them get away with it, boss. Bloody disgusting.”

  Guérin calmly put the scrap of paper on the table.

  “Lambert, kid, we’ve got work to do. You take the videos. They didn’t arrive together. A blonde woman, middling sort of age. Two men, similar. One with a beard. Well dressed. The suicide in the museum was at twenty past three. So look at that moment, check just afterwards, people leaving, and then go back and see who came in earlier. Probably a couple plus a man on his own. If you don’t find anything during the hour before, check the video back to opening time.”